TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Oops: NY Giving Back Half a Billion Medicaid Dollars

More evidence we probably wouldn’t be better off with government controlling all of healthcare (instead of just the half it does now): the half-billion dollars in Medicaid fraud New York State was found to have committed that just led to my already cash-strapped state having to give the money back to the federal government. Yes, let’s put government in charge of using resources more efficiently — and ethically — than we could do ourselves through diverse, competing, private mechanisms.

Reagan once joked that he liked to go to DC — to visit his money. I’m in DC today, and this Medicaid incident — especially coming amidst the current healthcare wrangling (which in turn comes amidst unprecedented and economically insane government “stimulus” spending) — makes me feel more than ever like I’m visiting the prison where part of me is enslaved.

Or to put it in simpler terms: If you’re pro-government, you’re wrong. You may have arrived at that position for what seemed the noblest reasons, whether hippie-derived, neocon-inspired, tree-loving, equality-seeking, drug-hating, or community-seeking. But you’re wrong. Stop it. Now.

1 comment:

So wait, let me see if I got it right. Local government authorized excessive payments to local providers of services in federal program by “not instructing them ” properly. As a punishment the recipients of this program in NY State will not get the services for the same amount of money that was overcharged by their providers. Who is punished here? Why the hospitals and private doctors who are the real culprits here are not made to pay the money back to Feds?

I used to have a neighbor, a primary care doctor who got rich very rapidly. We lived next to each other’s townhouse for 7 years; when he bought it, he had to pay mortgage insurance – he was so strapped for cash, he couldn’t afford 20% downpayment. In three years he was rolling in money. He told us he had more patients he could service – because “they just love me”, he said, – “I am that rear doctor that makes house calls. My practice is 85% Medicare and MedicAid; the patients are so happy they don’t have to go to some dingy Dr. office, they don’t mind me stepping by 3, 4 or 10 times a month. And they can care less how much I bill the MedicAid.”